Construction, Property and Cities Posts
Environmentalism is at the root of the housing crisis
Labour’s pandering to green quangos shows it’s not remotely serious about building the homes we need
Read the full article...How Net Zero leads to mouldy homes
The UK government’s insulation programme has been an all-too-predictable disaster
Read the full article...Five Critical Essays on Architectural Ethics
These days it seems that ethical behaviour has become a given
Read the full article...Labour’s elitist assault on housebuilding
Keir Starmer has sided with Brussels and the British aristocracy to block thousands of homes from being built
Read the full article...The ‘blob’ has gone to war with housebuilding
Britain’s environmental quangos are perpetuating the housing crisis
Read the full article...Why water rationing is coming down the pipeline
Instead of securing our water supply, the government plans to radically reduce home usage
Read the full article...Why our infrastructure is falling apart
Britain’s elites have given up on building for the future
Read the full article...The heat pump revolution: extracting power from the people
The climate technocrats’ posturing over heat pumps will be expensive, impractical and invasive
Read the full article...Grenfell
On the anniversary of the disastrous Grenfell fire, we are right to question the state of the construction sector
Read the full article...Why they can’t fix the housing crisis
Both the Tories and Labour dread the radical shake-up we really need
Read the full article...Britain’s housing crisis
James and campaigner Kennedy Walker debate solutions to Britain’s housing crisis
Read the full article...The future of housing
The future of housing
In 2004, with the architect Ian Abley, I published a book titled Why is construction so backward?.
Read the full article...Report on Sheffield City Centre, September 2015
This report suggests how technology and a fresh, libertarian approach to the future of Britain’s cities could go one better than the samey, grey spatial determinism that passes for urban policy these days
Read the full article...Colour, brands and identity in tomorrow’s cities
In London, they brought the fluid neon colours back. For more than 50 years, the moving, illuminated electronic liquid of Lucozade, an energy drink, inspired motorists driving above down-at-heel Brentford, as they reached the western approaches of Britain’s capital at night
Read the full article...This land is our land
If New Labour is serious about making homes more affordable, then it should allow members of the public to buy land and build homes where they please.
Read the full article...In praise of big cities
A controlled demolition of a new report that says… cities make us sick
Read the full article...A big stink over contamination
High profile companies face embarrassing clean-up operations – and ridiculous amounts of hysteria
Read the full article...The dangers of Brownfield Brutalism
New Labour’s narrow vision for infrastructure causes overcrowding and inflames the Malthusian idea that there are ‘too many immigrants’.
Read the full article...IT holds key to East London regeneration
Everywhere you go in an office, regulators want to control your life.
Read the full article...Stop this ‘urban regeneration’ roadshow
We need some tall thinking on city planning.
Read the full article...Constructive ideas from the East
China needs new homes – don’t we all?
Read the full article...Metro miserablists
Two new top-level reports only seem to see the downsides to life in a big city.
Read the full article...Homes 2016: Blueprint Broadside
Too many blueprints for the home of the future begin from the interior. They should start from the factory, argues James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley
Read the full article...Construction and transport: Victorian Britain lives on
Risk-aversion, short-termism and technophobia are holding back the UK’s roads, railways and buildings.
Read the full article...Why is construction so backward?
The UK government should ditch the sustainababble and build the prefab houses Britain needs.
Read the full article...Time to build a fresh, non-nimby approach to new housing
We should have more stigma-free prefab homes
Kate Barker’s final report on the supply of houses in this country, commissioned by Gordon Brown and due in the spring, comes not a moment too soon.
Read the full article...Review of Lightness by Adriaan Beukers and Ed van Hinte
Adriaan Beukers and Ed van Hinte, Lightness: the Inevitable Renaissance of Minimum Energy Structures, Uitgeverij 010 Publishers, July 1998
Read the full article...
Details in this Sunday Times article are extraordinary but unsurprising: Seems the PUBLIC are seen as a problematic threat to be managed/manipulated. Surely CPS impartiality is compromised by this decision? Read on...
1.6GW total from wind and solar this morning, from a total of ~45GW installed capacity. We're keeping the lights on by burning trees and gas. Nukes and reliance upon interconnectors making up the difference. No chance we can hit Net Zero grid by 2030.
“Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust”.
Ex-cop Democratic Party mayor, indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges, supported by Trump and critical of antisemitism, tells people to tighten their... throats.
What a mess! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/new-york-water-shortage?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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Bookmarks
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls